Hiiii everybody! We need rules to keep the place from going off the rails and your mod team would like you to give them a review and let us know what you think. We’re going to implement them now as a temporary ruleset so I’ll slap them into the sidebar shortly, then make amendments based on commentary. Here’s what we’ve got:
Community Rules
- Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
- Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
- Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
- Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very “off topic”.
- Avoid AI generated content.
- Avoid corpoposting.
- Avoid misinformation.
- Avoid incomprehensible posts.
- No prejudice such as transphobia, racism, ableism, etc.
- No threats or personal attacks.
- No spam.
- No tankie, nazi, or any other authoritarian behavior.
- No genocide denial.
Some people at .world dont know what they are talking about and thats ok. Lots of people there also dont know much of the queer terms we use here, and thats also ok.
If e.g. someone thinks “cisgender” is an insult, or exclusivly describes a queer person, that doesnt change the actual use, even if the mistake is common(like i have seen with “cisgender”).
So I think the definition is fine. If you can imagine the person in question defending brutal, oppressive actions of a State with a red flag, they are a tankie. And if someone self identifies as “tankie” then im not sure that id like to converse with them anyway, other then to get them to change their mind. And thats what this rule is for.
And lastly, infilitrating leftist spaces is the favorite activity of many tankies ive encountered back on reddit, many subs were “tankiefied” because of this. It does happen, sadly.
I definitely agree with being against states/state oppression. I think the main problem is just that someone doesn’t actually need to self identify as a tankie to feel excluded by the word. If someone gets a bunch of angry comments on .world calling them a tankie when they definitely aren’t, then even if this community/instance is trying to use it in a different, more accurate way it still has the possibility that they would feel unwelcome here. When the prevailing way tankie gets used by the rest of Lemmy is incorrect, then that usage kinda becomes the first thing people will associate it with when they see the term somewhere else on Lemmy.
I think for official rules tankie is vague enough that it’s better to just be explicit in what is actually against the rules like what’s already there with the “no genocide denial” and “no authoritarianism” lines. Adding “no tankies” on top of that just leads to a less clear definition of what sort of behavior is actually against the rules imo. Since everyone has different ideas of what someone being a tankie means it’s not always just the authoritarian aspects that get lumped into the definition but sometimes the leftist aspects too.
Obviously none of this is to say that authoritarianism, genocide apologia, or anything like that should be allowed. I’d just personally like the rules being more clear about that explicitly instead of muddying stuff unnecessarily by using tankie.